Heinrich Niemeyer (1900-1991) - Construction 1927

Heinrich Niemeyer: Construction 1928 (printed 1988)

An original silkscreen print, 60 × 60 cm, on paper, printed by Edition Partanen, Schluchsee, in 1988 after a constructivist composition of 1928. From an edition of 100; signed and numbered. In mint archival condition.

The composition dates from 1928 — the high point of international Constructivism, the years in which the geometric language of De Stijl, the Bauhaus and the Russian avant-garde converged into a shared vocabulary of pure plane, line and balance. Niemeyer's construction belongs to this moment: a rigorously ordered, non-representational arrangement in which form and proportion are the entire subject. The two constructions were realised as silkscreens by Edition Partanen in the 1980s and shown at the Art Basel fair in the year of printing.

Heinrich Niemeyer was a Dutch-German constructivist, husband of Rosel Niemeyer-Catrein and father of the Concrete artist Jo Niemeyer. His work stands at the head of a three-generation lineage of constructive and concrete art — a continuity rarely documented within a single family — that runs from his own geometric compositions of the 1920s through to the systematic Concrete work of the following generations. The present sheet, drawn from a 1928 composition and issued by Edition Partanen six decades later, makes that early constructive position newly available in print form.

Provenance:
Edition Partanen, Schluchsee
Private collection, Basel